Share your suggestions for evaluating schools without seeing them in person

CaliMex
Thu, 12 Mar 2020 16:22:56 +0000

All of the advice above is wonderful, but I would spend equal time making sure you are all absolutely clear on what are “must-haves” vs. “nice to haves” and really understanding the relative importance of different criteria.

When we went through this two years ago, we each listed 5-7 things that were important to us and then ranked them and gave them weights based on how critical we thought they were individually. (For example, parents gave more weight to logistical and cost considerations than the kid did… no surprise there!)

Then we rated each school across the criteria and multiplied by the rank-based weighting on our individual score cards.

Before we did that, we each had a different favorite. We just couldn’t agree.

But when we actually counted up the points using our rating system with weighted criteria, we were surprised to discover that our kid’s current school was at the very top of ALL of our scoring sheets. It wasn’t even close.